


ballast

by Siria



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s03e24 The Divine Move, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 13:52:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1690625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It wasn't so strange that standing by a graveside could make Derek dream of smoke and hunters and Kate Argent's smirk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	ballast

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Sheafrotherdon for reading this over.

Derek woke up clutching his stomach, the sound of her roar still echoing in his ears. His t-shirt was stuck to him, clammy with cooling sweat, and it took him a couple of tries to roll off his mattress and get to his feet. He felt coltish, weak, stumbling once or twice on his way to the bathroom, but when he flicked on the light and looked at himself in the mirror, there was nothing there. No wound, no blood, no rip in the fabric. 

He let out a shaky breath, sagged against the doorframe. It really had just been a dream. They'd buried Allison last week, Aiden a couple of days ago, and it wasn't so strange that standing by a graveside could make Derek dream of smoke and hunters and Kate Argent's smirk. 

He turned on the faucet, splashed icy water on his face, down the nape of his neck. The cold felt good, and Derek tried to focus on it. He was here: the loft's concrete floor smooth beneath the bare soles of his feet, the early morning air quiet around him. He was here, now, and there were no hunters, no guns, no snarling and terrible face. 

He was here.

*****

The next night she was there again. The smoke was thick and cloying against the back of his throat and Derek was falling, fire building in his gut and spreading steadily outwards. 

"Oh baby," she crooned. She was standing in front of him but Derek couldn't seem to lift his head; all he could see were the toes of her boots and he couldn't get up. "Right where I always liked you best, on your knees."

Kate reached out and took him by the chin, forcing him to look up at her face. It was like looking at one of those trading cards he'd sometimes collected from cereal packets as a kid, where the image changed as you tilted the card: now she was human, now she was all sharp teeth and sleek fur like nothing he'd ever seen. 

"It's okay," she said. Her claws were sharp, biting into his chin; he could smell her, the same perfume she'd preferred when he'd first known her. "All you've got to do is what you've always done, Derek. You've just got to let me in."

Derek shook his head, but even the motion felt weak to him, always too weak. 

"Let me in, Derek," she said, angrier now. 

Derek could feel blood trickle down his neck. He thought he could hear someone else calling out to him but it was echoing and distant, inaudible over the constant rumble of Kate's amusement. 

When he woke up it was almost noon, Kate's snarl lingering in the air and his cheeks wet with tears.

*****

He tried not to sleep the third night. Derek had gone days without sleep when he was an Alpha and he'd pulled more all-nighters since he'd moved back to Beacon Hills than he ever had in college. It should have been easy to make it to dawn with a pot of coffee, a stack of airport thrillers and a healthy dose of stubbornness. A night to distract himself should have been enough to reset, whatever Melissa would have made of it with her pointed sighs and her leaflets about the counselling services available at the hospital. It should have been enough. Instead he found himself slumped on his sofa by seven that evening, so exhausted that it felt like a weight on his chest, pressing down on him. 

Kate was there as soon as he closed his eyes. "Sweetie, I don't understand why you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result," she said. She didn't have a gun this time, just a knife; its blade shone blue in the dim light. "There's a saying about that, you know."

The fire in his gut was white-hot now, a constantly building agony. Derek gasped, back arching like his body was trying to get away from the pain, but it couldn't, he _couldn't_ , he was going to die like this. There were voices calling his name and Derek dug his fingernails into his palms, tried to make himself wake up, but he couldn't focus on anything but the pain. 

She leaned in over him, her hair falling around her face and filling his vision; put one of her hands on his stomach and just the promise of more pressure was enough to have him screaming. "Just say it, Derek. One little word and it's all over. It all stops. All you have to do is let me in." 

Derek clenched his jaw, shook his head fiercely with the last of his strength. His face was damp with tears and sweat and he was trembling with the effort of resisting her. It hurt, but he'd opened a door for her once before and look what it had cost him.

"Let me _in_ ," she roared at him, "do it! Before I—"

*****

Derek jerked awake. It was still dark, and his stomach didn't hurt, and he was flat on his back staring up at the ceiling. He could feel the sofa beneath him, uncomfortably damp with sweat, and he grimaced and sat up. A shower would help, and a change of clothes, but then he heard it again—the knocking at the door that must have been what woke him up. 

He hesitated for a moment, claws lengthening, not sure if he should ignore it or answer it, but then he heard the sound of muttering and the door rolled back. 

Stiles was standing on the other side of it. "Hey, hi, Derek," he said, with a weird little half-wave, "so okay, I know it's two in the morning and this is going to sound nuts and sorry for the breaking-and-entering and all, but for the past few nights I've been having these dreams and you're there and they seem sort of... intense?"

Derek stared at him. 

"Because of how I'm pretty sure that they're not so much my dreams and you're there but they're your dreams and I'm there?" Stiles was speaking quickly, and there was a faint tremor to his voice like he was afraid. When he stepped over the threshold and into the moonlight coming in through the windows, Derek could see that the skin beneath Stiles' eyes looked bruised. He was wearing one of his lacrosse hoodies but with pyjama pants instead of jeans; Derek wondered if he, too, had startled awake with his heart hammering in his chest, if he'd pulled on the first thing that had come to hand and run out the door. 

"And there's, uh, there's someone else there—"

"Kate," Derek said, in a voice that sounded rusty and disused even to his own ears. 

"Yeah," Stiles said, wincing. "And nothing about that seemed... good."

"That was you," Derek said after a long pause. "You were the one saying my name."

Stiles shrugged. "It didn't seem like either of you could see me, and I couldn't... I was trying to get to you but it was like the faster I ran the more I was staying still."

"Dream logic," Derek said softly. 

Stiles shook his head, and now he was right by Derek and the sofa. "No, dude, it was like... the first time it was like I was watching you from a distance but every time since it's been closer and closer."

Derek peered up at him. "What do you mean?"

"That was how the nogitsune got me, right—slithered in through a door in my head that the Nemeton opened? And I don't think we managed to close it. I don't think I'll ever be able..." He made an abortive little gesture with his hand, like he wanted to reach out and touch Derek but then thought better of it. "Sometimes I think I go wandering out through it at night and lately I've, uh, I've been finding you?"

"You're right," Derek said, "that does sound nuts." Stiles flinched and started to back away. Derek reached out and caught him by the wrist. "But that doesn't mean I don't believe you."

"Mixed signals here, dude," Stiles said on a shaky laugh.

"Why me?" Derek asked. "You just... somehow knew something was going on and what, you were trying to warn me through my dreams?"

"Well, you put it that way, of course it's going to sound crazy," Stiles said, "but hello and welcome to Beacon Hills, home of the weird shit." He hadn't pulled away; Derek could feel Stiles' pulse at his fingertips. "I don't... I don't know how I'm doing it, Derek. I don't even know if it's me doing it, or if it's that fucking tree. But it doesn't feel bad. Seeing what she's doing to you, that's fucking awful, but I don't think it's the Nemeton using me. I think it's just something I can do now."

Derek looked down at where his fingers were wrapped around Stiles' wrist. He thought about the distant echoes of Stiles' voice, growing steadily louder, calling him back; about the fact that Kate kept telling him to give in, but he hadn't yet. _I don't understand why you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result_ , she'd said, but maybe things had been different, lately. 

He stood up. Stiles was of a height with him now, and able to meet his gaze with a steady certainty that he wouldn't have been capable of even a couple of months ago—he was nervous, yes, Derek could smell that on him, but only because Stiles knew how important this was. 

"Werewolves need an anchor," Derek said, thinking about how his had been anger for the longest time, even when he'd still had Laura. But it wasn't now, not anymore, not for a while: there was the first tentative promise of a pack, of belonging. There was Cora. There was Stiles, working with him to find Erica and Boyd, holding him up in that pool for hours. 

"If this is something with an actual point to it, yeah, I'm not getting it," Stiles said after a moment. 

"Sometimes anchors work both ways." Derek shrugged. "Ballast." He was explaining this all wrong, he knew it, because he didn't have the words needed to say that maybe he could be someone else's safety. 

Stiles was looking at him like maybe he got it, anyway—and he was smart, Derek thought. He'd always been smart. 

"It's two in the morning," Stiles said, and something dropped in the pit of Derek's stomach because of course, Stiles needed to get back home, he wouldn't—but then Stiles was toeing off his sneakers and saying, "We should get some sleep."

"We?" Derek echoed.

"Yeah, well," Stiles said, heading over to the stairs that led up to Derek's bedroom. Derek was the one holding onto Stiles' wrist, but it felt like Stiles was the one who had a hold of him, drawing him on, inexorable, in his wake, up the stairs and into the dimly lit room. "I can't promise that I won't kick in my sleep—that's actually total evasion, Scotty will tell you I kick all the time and I'm a fan of like, weird pretzeltastic sleeping positions? So you know, sorry in advance."

"You're staying," Derek said softly, letting go of Stiles' wrist when he went to pull his hoodie over his head. 

"I figured, you know, better for me to be around for next time," Stiles said, tossing the hoodie off to one side. He was back to talking a mile a minute, shoulders loose and easy under a thin cotton t-shirt in a way Derek hadn't seen in a while. "Now that we know what's going on, maybe I can get there faster, help out."

"We know what's going on?" Derek said wryly as he pulled back the comforter. 

Stiles pulled a face at him before clambering onto the bed. "Okay, so yeah, Nemeton aside I have no idea why the very dead Kate Argent is showing up and being all bad touch in your dreams, but I guess we'll figure things out as we go along. It's worked for us before, right? Sort of."

Derek stood for a moment and looked at Stiles there in his bed, before slowly, carefully, climbing in to lie down next to him. He reached out and looped his fingers around Stiles' wrist again, and thought, vaguely, of high seas and moorings. Stiles didn't pull away, just lay there watching him like this was already something normal, something settled—and Derek supposed that if Stiles had seen the inside of Derek's head and had come here anyway, well, maybe some things were settled between them. 

"Thank you," Derek said. 

Stiles squinted at him. "I have no idea what even to do with you," he said, and Derek didn't have time to work out what that meant before Stiles was leaning in and kissing him. It was soft, and slow, and chaste, but against his fingertips, Derek could feel Stiles' heart-rate kick up. He smiled into the kiss, and was still smiling when Stiles pulled back.

"We are definitely giving you an A for effort," Stiles said, and Derek felt a little smug at how Stiles' breathing wasn't entirely steady. "And technique and also, holy crap, abs. But now sleep, where we're going to defeat your evil ex inside your dreams, and oh my god, what is my life that that's a sentence I just said?"

"Sure," Derek said, nestling down into the pillows and feeling, for the first time in a long time, like there was a chance that he might come out of all of this okay.

"In the morning, you're buying me waffles," Stiles said sleepily, curling close. "Extra strawberries, extra cream."

"Uh huh," Derek mumbled.

With Stiles standing next to him, telling her 'no' didn't hurt at all.


End file.
